November 11, 2008
*
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE*
Contact: Sandy Payette, Executive Director, Fedora Commons, 607
255-2773, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Michele Kimpton, Executive Director, DSpace Foundation, 617 253-7746,
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
*DSpace Foundation and Fedora Commons Receive Grant from the Mellon
Foundation for DuraSpace*
/Ithaca, NY, Cambridge, MA/ The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded
a planning grant to the DSpace Foundation and Fedora Commons in support
of their work to ensure durability and long-term access of scholarly
research output and digital collections. This comes after the two
largest providers of open source software for digital repositories
announced their intentions to form a working collaboration in July of
this year.
Over the next six months funding from the planning grant will allow the
organizations to jointly specify and design "DuraSpace," a new web-based
service that will allow institutions to easily distribute content to
multiple storage providers, both "cloud-based" and institution-based.
The idea behind DuraSpace is to provide a trusted, value-added service
layer to augment the capabilities of generic storage providers by making
stored digital content more durable, manageable, accessible and
sharable.
Michele Kimpton, Executive Director of the DSpace Foundation, said,
"Together we can leverage our expertise and open source value
proposition to continue to provide integrated open solutions that
support the scholarly mission of universities."
Sandy Payette, Executive Director of Fedora Commons, observes, "There is
an important role for high-tech non-profit organizations in adding value
to emerging cloud solutions. DuraSpace is designed with an eye towards
enabling universities, libraries, and other types of organizations to
take advantage of cloud storage while also addressing special
requirements unique to areas such as digital archiving and scholarly
communication."
The grant from the Mellon Foundation will support a needs analysis,
focus groups, technical design sessions, and meetings with potential
commercial partners. A working web-based demonstration will be
completed during the six-month grant period to help validate the
technical and business assumptions behind DuraSpace.
In terms of how DuraSpace might evolve, Chuck Henry, Executive Director
of the Council on Libraries and Information Resources (CLIR), notes that
"CLIR believes that DSpace/Fedora may offer some unique structures for
knowledge organization and services that can enhance digital humanities
scholarship, and those assumptions will be tested [with the grant work]."
*About the DSpace Foundation*
The DSpace Foundation (http://dspace.org/) was formed in 2007 to support
to the growing global community of institutions using DSpace open source
software to manage research output in a digital repository. DSpace was
jointly developed in 2002 by Hewlett Packard and the MIT Libraries.
Today, there are over more than 450 organizations worldwide a using the
software to capture, preserve and share their artifacts, documents,
collections and research data. To learn more about DSpace, please visit
(http://www.dspace.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=44&Itemid=157)
*
About Fedora Commons*
Fedora Commons (http://fedora-commons.org/) was established in 2007 as
the permanent home of Fedora open source software---a robust, integrated
repository system that enables storage, access and management of
virtually any kind of digital content. Fedora has been adopted by
hundreds of institutions worldwide as a platform for innovative
applications supporting open-access publishing, scholarly communication,
e-science, digital libraries, digital archives, education, and more.
Fedora Commons helps bridge the worlds of content management, semantic
technologies, and the Web. To find out about more about the Fedora
community, please visit:
http://fedora-commons.org/confluence/display/FCCommReg/Fedora+Commons+Community+Registry
*About The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation*
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (http://www.mellon.org/), a
not-for-profit corporation under the laws of the State of New York, was
formed on June 30, 1969. At the heart of the Mellon Foundation's grant
making philosophy is to build, strengthen and sustain institutions and
their core capacities in six core program areas: Higher Education and
Scholarship, Scholarly Communications, Research in Information
Technology, Museums and Art Conservation, Performing Arts and
Conservation and the Environment.
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